Older Brother
by littledaybreaker
Summary: Prior to and during the Games, Katniss and Gale reflect on their relationship with each other.


A/N: I...don't actually ship Everthorne. Hell, Gale isn't even one of my favorite characters. So where this came from is a complete bafflement to me. But kind of a nice one.

The epigraphs are _Older Brother _by Pepper Rabbit, and actually, I hold that song responsible for this whole thing. It isn't perfect (mostly because it's about somebody committing suicide), but it fits so well that I had to write it.

I hope the formatting is easy for people to understand-the beginning of each part (marked by the epigraph) denotes a change in POV. It's my first time writing anything in that format, so if there's a better way to do so, feel free to let me know!

01.

_We both sat on our beds in the room_

_and we talked about what was coming soon_

_All the pink powder won't cover up what we did_

_Doing wrong when we were just kids_

No matter how you look at it, the odds were never exactly in my favor.

If I had been chosen and she hadn't, I would have had to leave her. She would have had to watch me die. I would have had to know that she was going to have to watch me die. If we both had been chosen, she would have had to kill me—killing her would have been unthinkable. And now, I have to watch her die.

She could take this if the tributes from the other districts weren't so big, so powerful, so ruthless. She is fast, strong and smart and brave, but Catnip has never exactly been what you would call ruthless. She pretends she is, but she'll never be able to hurt another human being.

They take me back to the room where they have her sequestered and tell me "three minutes". As I wait for them to open the door, I'm trying to carefully plan what I want to say to her, how I can say everything I feel, everything I need to tell her before they take her away, possibly forever. But when they open the door, I forget it all.

She looks small and scared, and not at all like the Catnip I know, but a little like the Catnip I met in the woods all that time ago, and the first thing I do—the only thing I want to do—is hug her tight. She's shaking. "I'm okay," she says instantly, and I hug her tighter.

"Listen," I tell her, "You can't give up, okay? You can win this, but you have to be brave enough to fight back. You can hunt. You're better than most of them, maybe even all of them. Get to a bow and fight back."

"They might not have one," she says, voice small, muffled against my shoulder.

"If you can prove how good you are, they'll give you a bow. You're not going to give up, are you?"

She shakes her head no. I smile, just a tiny bit.

"Good." Our time is almost up. I want to tell her I love her, but when I try, my mouth goes dry, the words won't come out. I settle for, "see you in a few weeks."

This makes her almost smile. "Yeah," she says. "See you in a few weeks."

And then, just like that, I let them take her away.

02.

_And I think that you're the older brother that I never had_

_I wish I could reach out and touch you_

_Don't worry, I'm not sad_

As soon as they take Gale away again, I start to miss him.

I want to try to win, but there's a big part of me that knows that I won't ever see them again, and there are so many things that I wanted to tell him, things that I never knew how to tell him before and still don't know how, but that if I had the opportunity, I would have figured it out.

Instead, he told me to try to win. I told him to take care of my sister. And then just like that, he was gone.

I sit back on the couch in the little room they put me in with my eyes closed, trying to recall his face and all of the happy memories that came along with it. If I'm going to have any chance of getting through this at all, any chance of survival, I'm going to need to keep those memories, because they're the happiest thing I know. Prim has given me a reason to survive, but Gale gives me a reason to live.

I don't know what that means. I don't often understand emotion, and the way I feel about Gale is most complicated of all. Maybe someday, if I get to come home, I'll figure it out.

"See you in a few weeks," he says before he leaves, and I can't help hearing something else when he says it. I can't help hearing "I love you."

So I say, "See you in a few weeks" and hope he knows that I really mean "I love you too".

03.

_I know you're just where you want to be_

_And everyone's a hundred grand_

_Save some space for me and say hello to your dad_

_I will look after your sister, I swear_

_I'll write her when she's lonely and send it off in the air_

_I will keep her safe until I'm dead_

_She'll always have a place to rest her head_

_You don't have to worry about her now_

_You don't have to live with that frown_

I can't help it. I watch.

Not all of it, not even most of it, but I watch. It gets hard after the baker's son confesses his love, after they start acting like they've been in love all along, but at least I know that Catnip doesn't really feel that way. She can't, can she? She's never spoken to him before in her life, which just makes the baker's son look like a creep. No, it's all part of the plan, I know. It's part of the strategy to get her out alive.

Even without the baker's son, she does well on her own. And when it eventually comes down to it, she isn't afraid to kill the others. I knew she could do it. I knew she wouldn't be afraid. She's got too much fight in her to give up so easily.

I stop watching after what happened to the little girl, and start spending a lot more time with her sister. My own family needs me, I know, and I never let them go hungry, never let them be without, but Prim needs me in ways that my family doesn't.

We don't say much, and I don't always know what to say. It's not like I can take her out into the woods—she wouldn't last five minutes out there, Catnip was right about that—but I bring her game and she asks me to stay. We pet her mangy repulsive cat. Sometimes we draw pictures. And we write letters to her sister. I think we both know that she'll never read them, but it feels good to write them anyway.

In our letters we tell her that we're still cheering for her, that we think she might be able to win, that we'll see her when she gets home. And Prim tells her that if she doesn't come back home, to say hello to their dad. And we tell her we love her. At the beginning of every letter, at the end of every letter, sometimes in the middle, as if neither of us can say it enough. And we can't. Or at least, I can't.

"Do you think you'll get married someday?" Prim asks me one day when there are only four of them left and Catnip coming home seems like an actual possibility.

I shrug. "I don't know. Maybe. Catnip doesn't really seem like the marrying kind of girl."

Prim considers this. "She might. If it was you."

Neither one of us mentions the baker's son. I don't think too much about what that means.

04.

_I will hold your memory close to my chest_

_Though I wish you hadn't said it was best_

_Could you have stayed just one more night for all of us to say goodbye?_

_But all of your troubles are now gone_

_and you still feel so damn warm_

I don't think very much about Gale in the arena. Ever since Peeta's confession and Haymitch's instructions to play along I've been so consumed with that on top of trying to survive, on top of worrying about Rue, on top of _mourning_ Rue, that I just haven't had time.

But when I see him again, after the victory tour and after everything is done, when I can finally be myself again—or what I can piece together of myself—it's as though everything picked up where we left off.

He hugs me so tightly I can barely breathe and I can't bring myself to mind, because he's so warm and he smells faintly of coal dust and dirt and peppermint and _Gale, _like everything that is good and right about the world. "We're cousins now," he tells me matter-of-factly, his breath tickling against my ear and sending shivers of something I can't place up my spine.

"I know," I whisper back, and for some reason, my body presses closer to his. I want to drown myself in this moment. In _him_.

"I love you," he tells me, and his body is pressing right back against mine.

"I know," I whisper back, and this time, I tilt my face up and let him kiss me. For the moment, I have forgotten about Peeta, about the arena, about the show we must put on. For the moment, I am exactly where I belong, where I have always belonged, and I can't imagine being anywhere else.


End file.
